


Honest Souls

by trinityofone



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-10-23
Updated: 2004-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-28 20:05:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/996012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/pseuds/trinityofone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was something wrong with Spike’s dæmon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Honest Souls

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in October 2004 and posted it under the name girlwithjournal. I _think_ it was the first "dæmonfic"/HDM-fusion in fandom, so I'm preserving it for posterity. (I also corrected one painfully obvious typo and titled the story.) If anyone knows of an earlier dæmonfic, I'd love to know about it! (50% genuine curiosity, 50% ego. These proportions may be generous.)

There was something wrong with Spike’s dæmon.

Buffy hadn’t noticed. She was too preoccupied with Spike himself. Ever since he’d shown up unexpected and unannounced at her house...no, even before that. From the moment she first saw him, huddled in the school basement, she hadn’t been able to think of anything else. Even if she were in the habit of being completely honest with herself, which she wasn’t, she still wouldn’t have been able to decide what shook her more: that he had returned, or that he had returned so horribly, inexplicably _wrong_.

But her focus had been on him, not on his dæmon. Now her own dæmon, a snowy white ermine called Kasi, crawled quickly up onto her shoulder and settled himself in his accustomed place around her neck. He raised his mouth to her ear. “Something is wrong with Lys,” he said.

Buffy looked. At a glance, there was nothing externally wrong with Lys. Even in the basement, when Spike had been dirty and disheveled, raging at spirits in the air, Lys had been nothing but a constant, quiet presence at his side - just as she was now, perched on his shoulder in the form of a raven. Catching Buffy and Kasi’s eyes on her, she ruffled her dark wings and whispered something in Spike’s ear. He didn’t look up, his blue eyes remaining fixed on the hole in the ground.

Buffy frowned. “I don’t see it,” she told Kasi. He nipped at her ear. “Stop that,” she said. “You don’t know any more than I do.” And Kasi was quiet, because he didn’t.

“There’s nothing here,” Spike announced. At the sound of his voice, Buffy started. He was looking at her, his eyes cool and dark and... _sad_ , she thought. It made her stomach turn.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s go back.”

He nodded, and without another word, turned and started back toward her house. “He never used to be this quiet,” Buffy whispered to Kasi. “Maybe that’s it.” But Kasi scrunched up his little black nose in disagreement, and Buffy knew he was right.

Lys had jumped off Spike’s shoulder and was flying in slow, sweeping circles a little way above their heads. It was strange to see her in the form of a raven: it was not a shape she’d used often in the past, preferring a large black panther, or at times a snake. Both Spike and Lys had always delighted in the fact that, like all vampire dæmons, she could still change shape. If Buffy was completely honest with herself (which she wasn’t), she - and Kasi, too - had always had to contain a spark of envy at that particular vampiric perk. Both had fond memories of Buffy’s childhood, when Kasi had won them the respect of the whole school by being able to change form faster than all the other dæmons, flicking through shapes - lion, peacock, fox, gazelle, lynx, even a diminutive unicorn - while Buffy tossed her hair and preened. But it couldn’t last. Kasi eventually settled into his final ermine form. Less than a year later, Buffy discovered that she was the Slayer.

A flutter of wings, and Lys settled back on Spike’s shoulder. Yes, it was definitely strange to see her as a raven. It didn’t help that it was the same form that Giles’ dæmon took. The comparison made Buffy uncomfortable.

“But that’s not it,” Kasi said, before Buffy could even voice the thought. “It’s more than that.”

“Buffy,” Spike said, breaking through her thoughts again. His voice still had the same flat, level tone it had had all night. He gestured with his thumb in the direction of the nearest cemetery. “Lys thinks she saw something over in the Restfield. Want to check it out?”

Buffy felt herself nod. Spike inclined his head in response, and walked off in the direction he had indicated. Buffy and Kasi exchanged a look; then Kasi scampered down Buffy’s body and padded after him, Buffy following close behind.

She was having a hard time concentrating. She knew she ought to be focusing on the current evil - big, slimy worm ghast, blah blah blah - but she couldn’t take her mind off Spike. He was like an itch in her mouth that she couldn’t stop tonguing—okay, maybe that wasn’t the metaphor she wanted to use. The point was, he was there, omnipresent in her mind. And he wouldn’t go away.

She could sense that Kasi was equally distracted. Usually, when she and her dæmon were tracking some big nasty, Kasi would keep his nose to the ground, taking advantage of his keen sense of smell. Now, though, his delicate white head was pointed up at the sky, and though his nose twitched occasionally, Buffy knew that finding his way through the web of night smells wasn’t his primary concern. He was watching Lys.

Involuntarily, Buffy thought back to other times her dæmon had squared off with Spike’s. She remembered their first battle, when Lys, a humongous cougar, had held Kasi down no matter how valiantly he’d fought, scratching and clawing though he was horribly overpowered. Buffy, trembling and in pain, had thought they were done for—and then suddenly, Lys had let Kasi go, grinning madly through huge sharp teeth as she slipped back to Spike’s side. “That way’s no fun at all,” Spike had said, his own sharp teeth glinting in the moonlight. “It’s gotta be you and me, Slayer. Just you and me.”

She remembered a much more recent battle, only this time it had been Kasi holding Lys down while Buffy pummeled Spike relentlessly with her fists. Later, Kasi had told her that Lys, a snake, hadn’t struggled, hadn’t fought at all; and Buffy had shuddered, the sickness Kasi felt filling her belly; and then she and Kasi had looked each other in the eye, and both had made themselves forget.

But try as she might, she couldn’t forget their final fight - if you could even call it that. In her mind, it played and replayed, over and over again, as torturously slow as it had, in reality, been horribly fast. And the strangest thing - in some ways, the worst thing - was that when it flickered by, frame by frame, she was able to notice what at the time she had, of course, missed: Kasi, curled up in a ball at her side, his head tucked under his tail as he shook; and Lys, uncharacteristically a small grey mouse, pressed up against Buffy’s own dæmon, shuddering right along with him.

There were some that Buffy and Kasi didn’t talk about, not even with each other.

“Dead end,” said Spike. Buffy looked up: he was stepping over a cracked and crumbling tombstone that seemed to have broken when the ground beneath it was thrust violently upward. Beside the shattered marker was another hole like the one they had come from, only - judging by the rim of still-oozing slime around its edge - more recent. Spike knelt down beside it, and Lys jumped off her perch to peck at the ground by his feet.

Something about this pose reminded Buffy of how Spike had looked in the basement, and the image washed, unwanted, into her mind. Spike, his hair in disarray, his eyes flashing, his shirt rent to expose the horrible cuts that marred his chest...and beside him, Lys pecking absently at the dirty ground.

She’d been a raven then, too, Buffy realized. Odd.

Kasi obviously felt her discomfort. Buffy reached down and picked him up, his warmth reassuring against her breast. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.

“Angel,” she said, only realizing that was where her thoughts had turned as her lips formed the name. But it was true. In her mind’s eye, she could see Angel as she first saw him, lurking in the shadows with Vira, his wolfhound dæmon, at his side. At the time, they’d bantered, trading thinly-veiled sexual innuendo disguised as hostility, but that was not the conversation she now heard in her head. Instead, she recalled Angel telling her, not long after he’d returned from Hell, how surprised he’d been after the gyptians Stilled his dæmon that she was now in the permanent shape of a wolfhound—it hadn’t been her form when he was alive. And what _had_ been her form? Buffy’d asked teasingly, but Angel had shifted the subject, and they’d never talked about it again.

It was probably the most personal thing he had ever told her, Buffy reflected, but it still didn’t explain why she was thinking of it now. And then abruptly, it did, but before Buffy could say a word, Kasi leapt from her arms and threw himself on Lys.

Spike howled, all semblance of control gone in an instant. He scrambled backward through the dirt, a series of low, keening noises erupting from his chest. And through these, jumbled words, nonsensical scatterings of speech: “Quiet now, we’ll be quiet now...the door of the schoolhouse's closing...it’s time to put away our toys...” And even above that, another noise, a voice screaming, “Change! Goddammit, change!” With a horrified gasp, Buffy realized that the voice was her own.

She clapped her hands over her mouth. Kasi, who had his paws pressed firmly to Lys’ breast, shuddered and sprang back, releasing her. Her small black eyes were unreadable as she got to her feet and, casting a hateful look in Kasi’s direction, flew over to Spike, who was rocking himself and muttering. She landed on his shoulder and began, gently, to smooth his hair with her beak. Buffy turned away, feeling as if she were intruding on something intensely personal.

She wanted to run away - run as far and fast as she could; but Kasi dug his claws into her shoulder, and she knew she had to stay. Slowly, she turned back around. Spike had stopped rocking, but was still hunched in a ball on the ground. Two wet lines ran through the dirt on his face. “Spike,” Buffy said, her voice sounding harsh in her ears, much harsher than she’d meant, “what did you do?”

It was Lys who answered. Buffy had seen dæmons address other people’s humans in the past, and she knew it only happened when the humans were in too much pain, physical or emotional, to speak. So her heart sank when Lys opened her beak and, looking Buffy straight in the eye, said, “We did it for you.”

There was an accusatory note to her voice. She would not look at Kasi, and Buffy could tell he felt ashamed: he had buried his head in the crook of her arm. Buffy swallowed the lump in her throat and said, “You...you’re Stilled?”

“Still!” It was Spike who spoke, his blue eyes opening wide in the dark. “Still, but the world keeps spinning!” He laughed, wildly, but the sound broke halfway through: snapped and turned into a sob. Lys stepped off his shoulder and into his arms, and let him stroke her as he rocked.

Buffy didn’t want to watch this; she wanted to look away. Her mind was a fire of questions: _How? Why?_ And: _Had it hurt? Did it hurt still?_ And then, irrelevantly: _Was she always a raven, Spike? What were you before?_

Now he was reduced to a huddled mass of shaking limbs. _He’s_ not _my responsibility_ , part of Buffy thought, defiantly. Yet if she were completely honest with herself (which she wasn’t) she’d know that in fact, he was. She owed him that much.

She was turning to walk away when a pair of sharp fangs clamped down firmly on her ear. “We owe it to them,” said Kasi, stepping back with blood on his teeth. “Buffy,” he said, “they’re our responsibility.”

He scrambled down her body and walked back over to the pair crouching in the dirt, settling himself below Lys to wait until she was ready to acknowledge him.

Buffy hesitated only a moment, then followed.


End file.
